How to Make Your Small Business More Innovative

Can You Spark Small Business Innovation?

Don’t despair because you assume that great innovators are only born and not made. At the same time, prioritizing innovative solutions to your customer’s problems or your own company’s clunky business processes might be the only way that you can truly guarantee success in a competitive business market.

One study by Accenture polled business executives from across the country and found that 90 percent of them believed that their companies needed to innovate more in order to keep growing and succeeding over the next few decades.

A Step-By-Step Guide to Sparking Innovative Business Ideas

It’s tough for you to come up with new ideas sometimes when you’re too close to the problem. That’s why you might need a step-by-step guide to seeking answers from people who are close to your company but not quite as close as you are. Consider these practical ideas to start sparking your own creative visions:

Ask your customers: You should certainly start by asking your customers what they like and don’t like about your company. If you’re contemplating a new product, service, or additional feature, you might also survey your customers to find out what they think about it. After all, your current customer base contains the people who will most likely be your future customers, so they’ll give you better answers than relative strangers.

Ask your employees: You should always give your employees tools that they can use to offer productive feedback. You may have a simple forum or online suggestion box that allows them to make credited or anonymous suggestions. You could even spark your employee’s creativity by running contents for the best ideas.

Conduct lots of small experiments: If you believe you have a great idea, you can always break it down into smaller parts, come up with measures of success or failure, and start experimenting on a small scale. You won’t risk much. If the idea works out or not, you are bound to learn things from your investment.

Also, be sure to watch your competitors. At this point in time, Netflix is remembered as a great innovator because of the way they delivered streaming movies to people. When they started, video stores and even cable TV channels might not have paid a lot of attention. This oversight is one that those other companies have learned to regret. If one of your competitors begins to do something better than you do, you need to learn how you can make the next move to improve upon them.

Why is Innovation Important?

Basically, you should consider innovation as a synonym with improvement.For instance, a process improvement may make your employees more productive and happier and thus, improve employee retention. A product improvement might offer your customers a better solution that makes a real difference in their lives and in turn, allows you to increase revenues.

Your good ideas to improve your products and processes can help provide better solutions for your clients, customers, and employees. Innovations may make people’s lives safer, longer, healthier, or even more fun.